2
THE "DARK AGE" OF
GREECE AND THE EIGHTH-
CENTURY "RENAISSANCE"
(c. 1150-700 BC)

The archaeological remains from the late twelfth century give the impression
that a giant hand had suddenly swept away the splendid Mycenaean civilization,
leaving in its wake only isolation and poverty. By 1100 BC the palace-centers were
in ruins or uninhabited; so were the scores of once bustling towns and villages
across the entire Greek world. The cultural losses were catastrophic and long
lasting. For the next 450 years no monumental stone structures would be built in Greece. The art of writing was forgotten, and would not return until the eighth
century. Supplies of bronze and other metals dwindled to a trickle, as vital trade
links were broken. It would be two hundred years before Greek craftsmen again
turned out objects and jewelry of gold, silver, and ivory. And the kinds of luxury goods and weapons that the Mycenaean elite had taken with them into the
earth are not found in the graves of the postdestruction period. By contrast to the
brilliant age that had gone before, Greece had truly descended into a dark age.
Yet during those obscure centuries, a new Greece was rising, radically different
from both the old Greece and the other societies of the ancient Mediterranean.
The patterns of social and political integration that emerged from the shattered
palace-states would set the path to a new kind of state government in Greece,
the city-state (polis), which arose in the eighth century BC. The roots of the Greek
city-state, considered by many to have been the cradle of western democracy and
legal equality, were firmly planted in the Dark Age.

It took many years for Greece to recuperate fully from the shocks of the destructions and their aftermath. In the early part of the Dark Age, from about 1150
to about 900 BC, Greece was disturbed by sporadic incursions and movements of
people. Yet it is during this period of dislocation and turbulence that evidence of

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